Minisites Empire: a Land of Clones

No matter what industry, job or even hobby, some people out there want shortcuts.

I’m not talking about streamlining a process to speed things up, or outsourcing or any of the other viable and reasonable ways to make things quicker and easier.

No, I’m talking about the shortcuts that simply skip a whole chunk of the work, a lot of the time involving skipping the learning process too.

Systems like Minisite Empire are the internet marketing equivalent of steroids: they work really fast and help you skip a whole lot of hard work, but wisdom and experience is lost and more often than not it will backfire on you.

The Pitch

The whole premise of Minisite Empire is push button website creation.

It offers software that will auto create WordPress websites and fill them with content and adverts. The sales letter focuses on the great things it will do: add graphics, content, optin form and social icons. You can even choose from 5 cool colors. Not sure what’s cool about primary colors but there you go.

For your $9 bucks you get to make websites in just 3 niches, but you can create as many as you want.

Purchasing Minisite Empire

The front end offer is low priced at $9.95 in order to get you into the funnel so nothing new there. The funnel though is quite lengthy and could end up being costly.

If you were to buy everything in the funnel your wallet would end up being $464 lighter along with a monthly $27 fee for the membership upsell.

That’s quite a lot for a $9 product which goes to show that cheap products are often just a lure to try and get you hooked into spending more.

The upsells are:

9 more niches for $27

18 more niches for $47

A template to make unique mini sites in any niche for $67

Access to the Marketing Mastermind membership group for $27 per month

An unknown expensive upsell at $277. Probably only available if you purchased other products and my gut says it will be for some sort of coaching

You are sent two emails after purchase. One contains your log in details to the members’ area (not to be confused with the Marketing Mastermind membership). The other contains four links to download the “software” and the 3 niches.

After logging into the members’ area you are faced with essentially a bunch of adverts, with some training dotted about the adverts.

The training section consists of 7 videos that cover things like how to get hosting and a domain, installing the sites and editing content and data.

The “awesome software” is in fact ImportBuddy which is from iThemes the creator of BackupBuddy. Basically it takes one of the files you downloaded and re-installs it on your websites hosting.

In other words you’re just installing a copy of a site someone else made.

The sales pitch states:

Installs in minutes with no tech skills–you don’t even need to install WordPress–just follow the step-by-step walkthrough videos

Now, this is true, the video does guide you through the process, but if you were thinking that this is a one click operation think again. You will need to download and use FTP software, connect to your host via FTP and upload files. Use your cPanel to create a blank data base and edit PHP files.

Yes the video shows you how but I still believe some tech skills are required just to follow along with it. If you have messed about with FTP and WordPress sites in general you shouldn’t have too much trouble following along. If you struggle with email and anything harder than browsing the internet you may need to watch the video/s more than once and may have some difficulty getting it going.

After you have successfully added your site the rest of the training goes through how to edit and modify elements of it.

The finished product is a cookie cutter niche website, ready and waiting for you.

On the surface this is great: there’s content added and adverts and a theme and everything.

The content is the most important part of any website, and with this product the content you get is a waste of space.

Why? Well, it is duplicate content, and this is an absolute no-no from a search engine point of view. If they see your site has duplicate content they will penalise you, going as far as de-indexing the site (making it impossible to be found in the search engine).

In my opinion, the best thing you can do when installing a site made by Minisites Empire is to delete all the content immediately.

As of writing these are some of the other sites with the SAME content that you will have.

This then kind of makes the point of Minisite Empire pointless. The content is not even spun or aggregated from other sites, if 1,000 other people make a health site based on the Abs niche that comes with this product then 1,000 other people have the same content as you.

Not only that but you will end up changing the site anyway, the theme kind of sucks and as far as I can tell is not supported – the theme author’s site NicheCheap does not exist and Googling the theme name suggests a 7 year old theme that no longer exists.

The Bottom Line

Does any of this sound familiar to you? It should. Last year I reviewed a product called Minisite Riches and this latest offering, Minisite Empire, is virtually the same with a bit more spit and polish added and some wording changed. Yes the niches are different and it looks like you can do a little bit more, but essentially it is the same.

I’m not saying minisites can’t work, they can if done correctly. Yes they got Google slapped, but if done with unique and helpful content and the right SEO and backlink strategy then they can be pulled off.

The thing is, what Minisites Empire is doing is starting you off on the wrong foot. In fact it could easily push your site straight into the de-indexed bin, leaving you wondering why you’re getting no traffic and no commissions.

You could use it as a jump start method to get a basic site up and running, that’s the only positive I have for this, and even that is tenuous at best. Alternatively, if you don’t give a damn, you could install the sites, push loads of crappy links to them to get them ranking, make what cash you can and keep doing this. Each site will get slapped and de-indexed but who cares right? Onto the next!

Dean is self employed, working mainly with WordPress related projects and online marketing, whilst juggling a family life. A self confessed geek, he loves everything (well almost) SciFi and Fantasy related.

I’ve Tried That was started in 2007 to help protect consumers from falling victim to online scams. We’ve written thousands of articles, helped millions of people, and have saved a countless amount of money from falling into the wrong hands.